It’s a shame that both AMD and Nvidia chose to abandon the sub-$250 market. I think I’ve mentioned before that I searched and searched for an affordable video card, only to land on stuff that was generations behind. So I ended up with an A580. Only complaint I have so far is that LXDE absolutely hated the card and wouldn’t even boot in VESA compatible mode. But that’s more a complaint on Debian’s glacial pace than Intel.

I was honestly totally railing against these cards for the first two years they were out. Their performance per-watt is atrocious when compared to AMD, and just general performance is way below where it needs to be in order to contend with Nvidia. However…

They have turned out to be an absolute gem for video production and streaming. So much so that they have an up and coming niche in those spaces, which I was shocked to learn. Though I’m an AMD fan, they are last in this arena, with Nvidia being barely above AMD because of AV1, but these Intel cards are far and away the best tool for these jobs. Zero lag, real-time transcoding that doesn’t tax your system, and the hardware offloading “just works”. If I had a use-case for a batch processing transcoding pool of some sort, I’d use these.

Get in where you fit in, I suppose.